Sam Altman is president of YC Group, which includes Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, co-chair of OpenAI, and cofounder of VotePlz. The views expressed here are his.
I worry that people are getting too confident that Trump will lose. True, he has a 78% chance of losing, according to FiveThirtyEight.
But that’s still a 22% chance of Trump winning — in the startup world, those are excellent odds to succeed.
I’ve heard many people say that because Trump is going to lose anyway, they’re going to use their vote to protest Clinton (19% of millennials are planning to vote for third party candidates) or not vote at all (in 2012, only 45% of eligible millennials voted). They’re tired of the system we have now, and they don’t think she represents changes we need.
I understand the temptation — politicians aren’t getting the message — but the stakes are way too high, and things are way too close.
The Brexit vote in the U.K. may have happened because people incorrectly thought that their vote didn’t matter. Betting markets gave ‘Remain’ an 82% chance of winning right before the election. After all the votes were tallied, the U.K. voted to “Leave” the European Union.
A Trump victory is about as likely as a Brexit win was.
It wasn’t so long ago, in 2000, that 100,000 people voted for Ralph Nader in Florida, which George W. Bush won by a slim 537 votes.
Trump would be a disaster for the economy. His racist, isolationist policies will damage American innovation and growth. But the man himself is even more dangerous than his policies — he’s erratic, abusive, and prone to rage. I worry about our national security if he becomes our president.
If you’re scared of President Trump, you should vote for Clinton.